Exploring the History, Literature, and Culture of the Tar Heel State

This Month in NC – Piedmont Airlines’ First Passenger Flight, February 1948

Take flight into our most recent installment of This Month in North Carolina, which discusses the origins of Piedmont Airlines in Winston-Salem, NC. Tobacco and aviation are linked more closely than I’d ever imagined!

Piedmont Airlines’ inaugural passenger flight took place on Friday, February 20, 1948 at around 7 a.m. It left Wilmington, made several stops along the way to Cincinnati, OH, and then made the return trip home.

The photo above is from the Hugh Morton Collection of Photographs and Film, and shows two of Pidemont Airlines’ DC-3s parked in a WWII hangar they were using as a base. The photo is dated to ca. 1948, the same year as their first passenger flight.